Photo and video-sharing social networking platform Instagram’s head Mr Adam Mosseri has announced that the company has started testing a new feature called ‘Take a Break’. According to GSM Arena, this feature will help users curb their Instagram addiction and encourage them to take a break after spending a certain amount of time on the app. It’s an opt-in feature, which, after being turned on, will allow users to set in-app reminders to take a break from the Instagram app after continuously using it for 10, 20, or 30 minutes. Mr Mosseri has said that the ‘Take a Break’ feature has been developed as a “part of the broader effort to try and give people more control over their experience of Instagram” and that there will be “more ideas like this coming in the future too.” Instagram has worked with third-party experts to develop the ‘Take a Break’ feature, and it will begin rolling out to a small percentage of users over the coming days. As per GSM Arena, the company plans to launch this new feature sometime in December and if the testing goes smooth, ‘Take a Break’ will be available to all users in a month or two.
YouTube to start hiding count of dislikes on all videos
Earlier this year, online video-sharing platform, YouTube had started experimenting with hiding the dislike counts on videos to help reduce the dislike attacks on creators across the platform. According to GSM Arena, after analysis in July, YouTube did see a reduction in that behaviour, so the company has announced it will start hiding the dislike counts on all the videos across its platform. That doesn’t mean users won’t be able to dislike a video since the dislike button isn’t going anywhere, and they can still use it to tune the recommendations. It’s just that the number of dislikes a video gets will now be private to creators who can access it in the YouTube Studio.
YouTube has said that by hiding the dislike count, it wants to “create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves,” and that this is just one of the many steps the platform is taking to protect the creators, especially the smaller ones, from harassment.
While this seems like a valid reason, one might argue that dislike counts on a video are useful since they help viewers determine if the video’s worth watching. However, YouTube has stated that its research didn’t find any noticeable difference in the viewership regardless of whether or not users could see the dislike counts, as per GSM Arena.
